Crimes and Mercies (5 page)

Hoover wrote to President Wilson in February 1919 to suggest a plan that might get round a legal restriction on American aid to the Russian prisoners, who were by then starving to death ‘wholesale, by neglect,’ as Hoover said.
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Because his relief funds were restricted by American law to charity, and because the subject of aid to the prisoners was already assigned to the Red Cross and the holding power (the nation imprisoning the soldiers) under international convention, it was not strictly legal for Hoover to send American aid. But Hoover pointed out to the President that the object of taking care of the prisoners ‘is to prevent them going back to Russia in the middle of the winter and joining in the Bolshevik army, and therefore is solely a military purpose.’ He wondered if it might be the duty of the American army to furnish supplies to save them from both starvation and bolshevism – in Hoover’s mind, the two were synonymous. The army had plenty of supplies, its communications were essential to their distribution, and no questions would be asked if the decision were taken. The food went and the lives were saved. This was the first in a long series of American mercies extended to the Soviets, despite their avowed purpose to overthrow American capitalism by violence.

Hoover did not help communists because he approved of their politics, but because it was wise. He was certain that communism was so stupid that it would ‘fall of its own weight’. In the meantime, he could demonstrate the vast superiority of capitalist democracy while preserving the lives of those who would soon see the light. Soon after the war he travelled around the USA raising money at lightning speed. He raised over one million dollars (about $17–22 million in 2007) in one evening from some of
America’s richest men, who paid $1,000 per plate to hear him speak while they stared at the dinner of rice and potatoes that was all the children of Poland could expect for that whole day. He was mainly responsible for persuading the government to give Poland over $159,000,000 in grants and loans, which equals around two and a half to three billion dollars today. In 1920, the American Relief Administration (ARA), staffed largely by volunteers working for little or no pay, was feeding over one million Polish children every day at 7,650 stations. Hoover managed this with a minimum of government help, and great popular support. As he told US Secretary of War Robert Patterson in 1946, there was such popular approval for his measures in 1919 that there was no need to threaten the American people with the spectre of German food riots. In 1919 and in 1946, the popular reaction was the same: feed the starving. And Hoover was prepared to satisfy their desire.

When Hoover visited Poland in 1919, some 30,000 children paraded across a grassy sports field in Warsaw to cheer him. ‘They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they had had their special meal of the day … thanks to the charity of America organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which they could wave over their heads … These thousands of restored children marched in happy never-ending files past the grandstand where sat the man who had saved them … They marched and marched and cheered and cheered … until suddenly an astonished rabbit leaped out of the grass and started down the track. And then five thousand of those children broke the ranks and dashed madly after him shouting and laughing …’
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Watching beside Hoover stood the head of the French Mission, General Henrys, a tough soldier who had survived the First World War, ‘with tears coursing down his face until finally, overcome, he left the stand. He said to Hoover in parting, “
Il n’y a eu une revue
d’honneur des soldats en toute histoire que je voudrais avoir plus que
cette qu’est vous donnée aujourd’hui
” [“There has never been a review of honour in all history which I would prefer for myself to
that which has been given you today.”]’ Hoover himself wept for joy before that young crowd.
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In the work Hoover attacked so vigorously, and with such huge success, we see foreshadowed many of the problems that have beset us to this day. The vengeful Versailles peace terms, which he wished to make more reasonable, led directly to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler; the racial conflicts among Serbians, Bosnians and Croats that precipitated the First World War continued for decades; the cruelties and failures of Soviet Russia were only just ending; the communism that triumphed in China in 1949 continued to blight millions of lives; the allegations of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe foreshadowed Hitler and the fate of the European Jews, right down to reports of ‘a holocaust … in which six million human beings [Jews] are being whirled towards the grave by a cruel and relentless fate.’
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When he heard these reports of attacks on Jews in 1919, Hoover advised President Wilson to appoint a committee of investigation. Among the members recommended by Hoover was Henry C. Morgenthau, son of a US diplomat and philanthropist, and later Secretary of the Treasury, who helped prepare the report to Wilson ‘exposing falsity and creating a generally more wholesome atmosphere.’
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Hoover dealt with all these problems, foresaw the consequences and accurately predicted the outcomes. On the prime threat to Europe, bolshevism, he was particularly acute. In March 1919 he told the President, ‘… the Bolshevik has resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even amongst reactionary tyrants. He has even to a greater degree relied upon criminal instinct to support his doctrines than even autocracy did. By enveloping into his doctrine the cry of the helpless and downtrodden, he has embraced a large degree of emotionalism and has thereby given an impulse to his propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements … I have no fear of their propaganda in the United States …’

Bolshevist propaganda did not move him because he knew that the system had inherent defects which would destroy it without any outside pressure. He told Wilson that, ‘Sooner or later the Bolshevik government will fall of its own weight or it will have swung sufficiently [to the] right to be absorbed in a properly representative government.’
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Hoover advocated ‘large financial and moral support of the Allied governments’ to help ‘establish a new government.’
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In every detail of his analysis of the Bolshevik problem and of its future, Hoover was absolutely correct; his prediction has come true to the letter. Only Stalinist cruelties such as the world had never imagined, the failure of Christian Russians to resist and the mistakes of the Europeans and North Americans kept the regime in power decades longer than Hoover anticipated.

He saw the world’s hope in his own country. He told Wilson that ‘It grows upon me daily that the United States is the one great moral reserve in the world today and that we cannot maintain that independence of action through which this reserve is to be maintained if we allow ourselves to be dragged into detailed European entanglements over a period of years. In my view, if the Allies can not be brought to adopt peace on the basis of the 14 Points, we should retire from Europe lock, stock and barrel, and we should lend to the whole world our economic and moral strength, or the world will swim in a sea of misery and disaster worse than the dark ages …’
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On Germany he was darkly prescient: ‘The blockade should be taken off … these people should be allowed to return to production not only to save themselves from starvation and misery but that there should be awakened in them some resolution for continued National life … the people are simply in a state of moral collapse … We have for the last month held that it is now too late to save the situation.’
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In the midst of terrific pressure to bring food to the starving, when another man might have acted unilaterally to save time, Hoover scrupulously observed the limits of the rather vague mandate given him by Woodrow Wilson. Whenever he thought he
was nearing the fringes of his power, he warned Wilson that he could not cope with the problem he had been given without further powers. He then pointed out the consequences of inaction and advised as to the solution. Very often President Wilson took his advice without checking it with anyone else. He often wrote on the bottom of Hoover’s letters ‘Approved, Woodrow Wilson.’
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According to Henry L. Stimson, who had a brilliant career in American government in the 1930s and ’40s, ‘Hoover has the greatest capacity for assimilating and organizing material of any man I ever knew.’
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In all this, Hoover was personally disinterested; in all this he always saw clearly the interests of the unfortunate and downtrodden. In all this he was first a humanitarian, without ever ceasing to be gladly American; in fact, his feeling for the United States was founded partly on the ability of the United States to rise above its own preoccupations to succour the world.

Because of his supranational goals, he saved millions of people while other leaders – especially those at the Paris Peace Conference – had no idea what to do after the crash except to glue the wings back on. They believed they were practical, realistic men, but according to one brilliant British observer at the conference, A. J. Balfour, the chief Allied leaders were ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with only a child to take notes’.
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The ‘system’ they devised was as crude as a stone axe, truce pinned in place by the threat of slaughter. It lasted only as long as fear was stronger than resentment. Hoover saw the consequences of their decisions, he described them clearly, and he acted successfully on his views, within his own mandate. He could do so because he saw before anyone else that in those days, it was
in
the national interest to rise
above
national interest.

In 1923, Hoover received the thanks of three of the highest officials in Soviet Russia for his relief work. In a letter dated from the Kremlin, Moscow, July 10, 1923, L. Kamenev, Acting President of the Council of People’s Commissars, and N. Gorbunov and L. Fotieva, also members, wrote:

Unselfishly, the ARA [American Relief Administration] came to the aid of the people and organized on a broad scale the supply and distribution of food products and other articles of prime necessity.

Due to the enormous and entirely disinterested efforts of the ARA, millions of people of all ages were saved from death, and entire districts and even cities were saved from the horrible catastrophe which threatened them.

Now when the famine is over and the colossal work of the ARA comes to a close, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, in the name of the millions of people saved and in the name of all the working people of Soviet Russia and the Federated Republics, count it a duty to express before the whole world its deepest thanks to this organization, to its leader, Herbert Hoover, to its representative in Russia, Colonel Haskell, and to all its workers, and to declare that the people inhabiting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will never forget the help given them by the American people, through the ARA, seeing in it a pledge of the future friendship of the two nations.
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And indeed, that friendship continues today. In the 1990s, they were still in need of food, and we in the West joined with the Americans in sending it to them. Now, in 2007, we understand that Hoover in 1920 spoke the truth when others were dumb. In those days so long ago and so different from now, he was an accurate prophet. Yet he was simply carrying out one of the basic Christian precepts of Western society, to forgive your enemy, and do good to those who hurt you. One could say there was no prescience at all. The ideas of Hoover, as Gandhi said of his own ideas, are as old as the hills and so endure.

In 1919, Hoover was in Brussels to attend a conference to present to the Germans a formula he had devised for solving the blockade problem. A British Admiral, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, was the head of the British delegation. He saw Hoover in the hotel lobby one day, and said brusquely, ‘Young man, I don’t see why you Americans want to feed these Germans.’ To which Hoover
immediately replied, ‘Old man, I don’t see why you British want to starve women and children after they are licked.’
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From Brussels Hoover went on to Paris, where he helped President Wilson negotiate the details of the German peace treaty. He was still struggling against his nemesis, Winston Churchill, who energetically advocated continuation of the blockade in the House of Commons: ‘Germany is very near starvation,’ Hoover believed, ‘… [there is] the great danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the time to settle.’
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Churchill was opposed not only by Hoover and Wilson, but even by his former ally, Francesco Nitti, Prime Minister of Italy, who said, ‘It will remain forever a terrible precedent in modern history that against all pledges, all precedents and all traditions, the representatives of Germany were never even heard; nothing was left to them but to sign a treaty at a moment when famine and exhaustion and threat of revolution made it impossible not to sign it …’
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Hoover protested to the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who immediately criticized him for failing to send in the food. Hoover let him have it, in ‘a torrent that he ought to remember even in his grave,’ slamming the British and French officials who were obstructing his relief work. To the Prime Minister’s face, Hoover denounced the ‘grasping attitude of your trickster minions.’ The British navy was even preventing the German fishing boats from going out to catch fish. Hundreds of thousands of tons of food were lying on the docks at Rotterdam waiting to go up-river to Germany, while Germans starved.

As Hoover dryly noted after, Lloyd George was an overworked but a reasonable man.
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Lloyd George later quoted Hoover’s words in a speech of his own, demanding that the French in particular cease their obstructionism, otherwise they ‘would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread bolshevism in Europe.’
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